Nov 30, 2010

When I was a first-year undergraduate in college I took an art history course.

My mother already had an advanced degree in the field. She had bought impressionist paintings in Paris in her younger years. Among her New York friends there were hundreds of valuable impressionist and post impressionist paintings that I saw often.

In the art history class we were constantly shown slides. When the instructor came to the slide of a woman in a window and said that it was painted by Jacques-Louis David I stood up and objected. I said that the painting of the woman in the window was significantly different from the other David paintings we were shown. The instructor told me to ‘F--- off’.

At my next vacation break, I went to Manhattan where I regularly stayed with my uncle and other relatives. On this first trip I went to the Metropolitan museum and went straight to the room that had only Davids in it. In the most prominent position there was the woman in the window with the name David below.

I talked to several curators including the main curator and pointed out that this painting was not done by David. I was only 16 at the time. I bought half a dozen of the Met’s postcards that showed the same image with the name David on it.

That was the winter school break. When I got back to the Met for the following Spring break, 1956, the woman in the window was no longer on the wall. And six months after that the painting was in a new room with the correct artist identified: Marie-Denise Villers.

Nov 29, 2010

I live in the gay community in San Francisco. The one conversation that I never have is tied up with the issue of polygamy. The Mormon Church considers the issue of gay marriage and marital tradition related to polygamy.

The gay community does not believe there is a connection.

The Mormon Church was found more than 175 years ago. At its founding, polygamy was an issue and has remained so to this day. The original Mormons who crossed the Mississippi and moved to Salt Lake City did so to escape hostility to polygamy.

Beginning in the 1850s, after Salt Lake City was founded, and continuing until the 1900s there was an unending stream of novels portraying polygamy as horrific. These novels sold in large quantities in the Eastern United States.

By 1862 Congress passed the first anti-bigamy law. The law was not enforced in Utah. But the issue continued to grow. A new law was passed in 1882 by Congress that denied voting rights to anyone in a polygamous marriage. The Supreme Court upheld the law.

By the late 1800s the Mormon church dissolved and reformed on this single issue. The modern church that we know, LDS, bans polygamy.

But a very healthy Mormon Fundamentalist church exists throughout the Western North American continent. It becomes visible on occasion and always continues as a thorn in the side of the standard Mormon Church.

It really doesn’t matter whether the gay community believes that polygamy is unrelated to the issue of gay marriage the Mormon Church does and will continue to act on the basis of their 175 years of experience.

Nov 28, 2010

The idea would be similar to the Archie Bunker All in the Family series.

This time there would be a reversal of the role. The family or associates would be ridiculing a woman who constantly brought home men whom she wanted to change. The woman would also be a political liberal.

The consequence would be a story in which comparisons were made with the woman’s dates and the liberal positions intended to change society. The woman’s desire to change a man and voting to change society would be on a continuum.

Of course the series should reverse the roles on a regular basis since men make a similar effort to create the perfect female partner. A plastic doll.

Nov 27, 2010

My theory of obesity is now moving into the realm of public acceptance. Let me explain.

The way that an idea moves from the realm of concept to popular understanding is as follows: first people must laugh at the idea, second people must denounce and debate the idea, third many people must treat the idea as their own and lastly the public begins to see the idea repeated often.

My theory of obesity is straightforward. Industrial food has evolved to the point where there are many foods (cereals, peanut butter, dressings, prepared dinners, frozen foods etc.) that are so appealing to a particular person that that person is unable to resist the food. The foods have evolved to match the specific uncontrollable tastes of specific people.

This cartoon is a joke about my theory. That means that my theory is on the way to popular recognition. We are all fortunate.

Nov 26, 2010

We need to put on the record for all people who follow politics that in two races in San Francisco and one in Oakland the use of ranked choice has led to an unexpected result.Ranked choice is the mechanism that both of these communities and many others have chosen in order to avoid the costs of runoff elections.

A ranked choice ballot shows all the names of candidates for a specific office with three columns after their name. The voter is instructed to select their first choice and their second choice and third.

When the voting is tallied, the candidates that have the lowest number of votes have their their second and third votes distributed to the rest. The process proceeds until all of the second and third votes of the lowest ranked candidates have been distributed.

In the previous elections, I have seen, the candidate who got the most first votes was the final victor. Two elections in San Francisco for supervisor and one for the Mayor’s race in Oakland that did not occur. Another person on the list of ranked choice ended up with the most votes.

Now that rank choice is understood as an unstable system new tactics will emerge.

I will of course watch this with great interest but no concerns. At some point the populace will learn that selection by voting does not generate representatives. To be truly representative, legislatures must be selected at random from a population. Just like survey reseach.

In the case of a mayor or other administrator the final choice should be from a group such as the Board of Supervisors or other legislative body.

Nov 25, 2010

Back in the old days, 1987, one pacifist got his legs chopped off at the knee and brain damage from lying on the tracks in front of a working railroad engine outside the Concord Naval Weapons Station.

The following week there was a large demonstration at the same location and the Rev. Jessie Jackson gave a rousing speech to the crowd.

I was in attendance, at the very back of the crowd. The crowd was riled up, truly an understatement. The crowd was so angry that it proceeded to tear up the railroad tracks.

I joined the crowd. What had happened was that a single student from UC Berkeley had brought a large wrench and had loosened the connection between two connecting rails. Once the track itself was loose the crowd around the track began pushing it back and forth. The track broke at the end where it was no longer bolted to the next rail.

As the crowd proceeded to shake and then remove a segment of track one at a time another part of the crowd began pulling up the ties. The crowd was very neat and stacked the ties in piles and stacked the rails in piles equally neatly.

What is truly astonishing is that a group of human beings, probably no more than 20 at a time, can pull off railroad rails; and five or six people can pull up a railroad tie.

A crowd of several hundred was able to remove half a mile of track and neatly stack it.

Nov 23, 2010

The photo on the right is one of the United States mint. It is located in San Francisco, built on a particular out cropping of rock. The selection of this rock outcropping originally had to do with a formal protection for the mint. Hard to dig under.

The rock outcropping is one of seven in San Francisco that is made of serpentine. Serpentine is a beautiful green rock with many minerals. Interesting plants grow on it.

Two projects are underway in the photograph. On the right-hand side you can see that the rock area underneath the mint has been covered with a fabric and plants are growing through the fabric. On the left-hand side of the rock under the mint the entire face of the rock is being covered with Gunite or some similar cement facing.

It turns out that serpentine has some small percentage of asbestos in it. There is not a shred of evidence that the asbestos in the serpentine could possibly do any harm. In fact there are many small towns that are built on or near similar outcroppings. At no point has anyone ever shown population problems related to asbestos.

It does appear that we have a case of environmentalism gone mad, completely mad..

Nov 22, 2010

I am calling this one right now: when someone calls you or your group racist they are insulting themselves.

T his is a major change in our society. For more than 50 years calling someone a racist has been pejorative. It is no longer. The caller is now the loser.

I noticed the change sometime last summer but it has just reached my consciousness. The Left has been calling the Tea Party racist for two years. Since the Tea Party knows that this is false it has destroyed the claim of racism in the minds of the American middle class.

I have actually heard the change in tone on radio talk shows ranging from Dr. Laura to Rush. There is a distinct sensitivity that people who call others racist are themselves malicious.

This is a significant change in our society. We will find the charge of racism to have lost nearly all its power thanks to the careless use of the term by people like Jesse Jackson, Rev. Sharpton, the mainstream media and the NAACP.

To some extent it may also be relevant that the president is called a "black" by most people and the black community lends creedence with its support of him by 90%.

The possible relation between the president and the demise of the charge of racism comes from the fact that the president spent 20 years in a racist church with Rev. Wright. The President's current role as Jew hater-in-chief suggests that the Rev. Wright's anti-white anti-Jew racism is comfortable for the president.

Anti-white anti-Jew, blacks have no credibility calling whites racist. They have been an import part in negating the word racist.

Nov 21, 2010

T he list begins with Benedict Arnold. It includes president John Tyler who became a member of the Confederate Congress. It includes John Wilkes Booth and several assassins up to Lee Harvey Oswald and Sirhan Sirhan.

The list includes former president Jimmy Carter a man who is somewhere between pure evil and deranged by his virulent Jew hate.

The list now includes Nancy Pelosi. Congresswoman Pelosi has earned her place on the list of worst Americans for having created a great deal of misery for a large percentage of Americans. She generated massive unemployment as a result of her trillion dollar stimulus package which directly harmed the American economy. She is also on the list for her passage of a health care bill, using extralegal tactics, that earned the opposition of the majority of American’s and who consequently rose up to throw out the Pelosi Congress.

Ms. Pelosi added to her offensive behavior with a third action, a bank and finance reform bill that made sure job creators would do nothing to improve employment.

What is peculiar, is that Congresswoman Pelosi’s automatic position on the worst Americans list resulted in her effort to cover up her own disgraceful behavior. She forced Democrats in a lame duck Congress to make her minority speaker.

Do you follow the logic?

Pelosi knows she is one of the worst Americans. In order to keep her reputation from immediately resulting in her being burned in effigy she convinced her fellow Democrats to give her an honor.

It is a case of a monster losing at trial and having a pro-monster demonstration outside the courthouse.

Nov 19, 2010

In San Francisco the Salvation Army is reporting a significant, 20%, decline in contributions over the past year and a half. Two other similar organizations have not experienced the same decline in donations.

The reason is simple, the Salvation Army is particularly noted for accepting toys and clothes for children. The toys and clothes where cleaned and resold.

New federal regulations ban the sale of secondhand toys. The ban on secondhand toys was the consequence of some Chinese lead problem of insignificant magnitude, and wild overreaction.

I always love to see environmental do-gooders screwing other social do-gooders and poor people all at once. Exactly what we have in this case.

Nov 18, 2010

As pointed out in an earlier blog I am baffled by the constant political and journalistic pretense that unemployment somehow affects elections.

Whatever the mechanism, it is invisible. The unemployed themselves are disproportionately Democratics. Democrats, to whatever extent they are able to vote. Nothing about more unemployed people is likely to produce more or less Democratic voters.

So who is directly affected by unemployment? Family and friends? These are also most likely Democrats unlikely to be the key power voters. Power voters are the independents.

It is possible that small business owners who see a decline in business may make some connection to the unemployment rate. They might be influenced by the level of unemployment but I don’t see the connection if they want less unemployment. They wouldn’t vote Democrat. If they are self-employed they are already most likely Republican.

So where is the connection between unemployment levels and political behavior?

Nov 17, 2010

In a recent article I read by Roger Scruton, he excoriates the environmental movement for its love of nature over humans.

However in the article he uses urban areas as an example of positive human institutions and argues the need for more attention to urban areas.

Unfortunately his image of urban areas includes many elements of suppressed human vitality. He has a strong distaste for billboards, signage and gaudy displays of many sorts.

Sorry Roger, the most exciting city I know is Tokyo. Tokyo is helter-skelter chaos; visually, architecturally and certainly in terms of exotic signage. The cities closest to imitating Tokyo in excitement are Shanghai and Hong Kong two other cities with visual chaos.

Roger you are too influenced by milquetoast village sentimentality very much in vogue in places like Palo Alto and Princeton. These are not cities with great vitality they are bland suburban accommodations to Puritan life.

Nov 16, 2010

One of my readers wrote a lovely e-mail explaining that he values my opinion and as a law student he would like to know if there is any part of the legal profession that is good for commerce.

My general view of the legal system in our society is that it exists because we are so egalitarian.

In a highly structured hierarchical society the legal system is minimal because everyone knows that the person higher up in the hierarchy will win a legal case.

Therefore the main function of the law is to resolve conflict among equals. In this sense, any pro-commerce society must find some way to compensate for the inequality generated in the marketplace. A pro-commerce society needs a disproportionate, probably an excess amount of legal squabbling.

To use a football metaphor more referees are needed when the teams are fairly equal. Referees have little to do when one team is excessively powerful.

In thinking about a legal career that would be generally positive for commerce, I can only find one; that would be immigration law.

I have only known one competent immigration lawyer and she was immediately put on the bench. The reason immigration law is so vital is because the United States needs hundreds of thousands of new qualified immigrants every year and we are not getting them. It is not just the written law, it is fighting to get through the available slots.

Immigration lawyers could handle thousands of such cases and would be of enormous benefit to commerce.

If you can think of some other form of legal practice that is pro-commerce let me know. I have not stopped thinking about the subject but I have not found any other forms of law that are unambiguously pro-commerce.